“Is that all for you today?”
I am standing at the cash register of Bookends & Beginnings, an independent bookstore located in Evanston, Illinois. As a Residential Teaching Assistant at Northwestern University for the summer, I find myself visiting Downtown Evanston on my days off—to linger by the lakeside with the frivolousness of a firefly or to take on a more businesslike demeanor and march down the streets, making it seem as though I am headed somewhere very important. I take off my earphones and smile at the cashier. “Yes,” I responded, unsure of what to say next. There is a visible sense of trepidation in my demeanor, as I find myself trapped in the squelchy grey bubble of wanting to initiate conversation, and not knowing whether I would receive a response. I am holding a purple volume of poetry between my fingers, with a hand painted cover that called out to me in the loudest of voices, coaxing me to call it on my own and, for once, judge a book by its cover.
“I really love this poet. And the cover is so pretty,” continued the cashier, as I nodded in affirmation. “Fatimah Asghar is such a good poet, and she’s based in Chicago too! Once you’re done reading, I would like to recommend another poet who writes just like she does. I think they go hand in hand together,” she explained, as I felt my grip around the book tightening with demonstrated conviction. This wasn’t a marketing gimmick—this was, in fact, a sharp re-affirmation of a literary choice that I had just made. The mere acknowledgement of my purchase was something that touched my heart, and as a hard-core book lover, I made up my mind to visit this store again.
I walk back to my residence, a conveniently-located room in Schapiro Hall, a location that is infamously known as Northwestern University’s “poshest” dorm. I am reminded of my bookstore visits in my college town, Berkeley. As an English and Creative Writing major, my semesters would begin with a visit to either Moe’s Books or Half Price Bookstores, eager to get my hands on all the recommended volumes before they were sold out. These visits were not limited to the scope of a simple financial transaction. Instead, they involved the active barter of recommendations, conversations and ideas.
Spanning between an hour to an hour and a half, these interactions left me with a sense of mouth-watering completion, an emotion so flavorful that I feel its taste in my mouth long after the interaction has ended. Individualized as this experience might sound, it pains me to admit that it isn’t mine alone. It is echoed by several English majors who continue to recommend these bookstores to not only friends, but also to their professors. The sentence fragments “They have great books” and “The owner is great” are almost naturally woven into each other, resulting in an elegantly woven yarn ball. Like all other yarn balls, disentangling this one results in a labyrinth of disconnected threads, all wrapped around each other. From Fall 2025, it seems as though this unravelled ball of yarn is all that the UC Berkeley community will be left with.
On July 6, 2025, Berkeleyside, a local Berkeley-based newspaper, confirmed the closing of Half Price Bookstores, a family-owned chain of bookstores that supplied most of the “recommended readings” to the English students at UC Berkeley, due to an alleged lease dispute with a landlord. It’s not just a great place to buy books. Half Price Bookstores also sells CDs, posters, art work and stationery, and buys used books at a very reasonable price. This makes it integral to the pulsating heart of Berkeley and, in its absence, the town’s literary community will revolve around a gaping void. SFGate furthers this idea of communal loss by describing the closure of the bookstore as something that occurred after twenty years, “leaving a hole in the hearts of locals, college students and lovers of physical media alike.”
Responding to a Facebook post by Berkeleyside that announced the closure of the bookstore, several members of the Berkeley community came together to express their agony. Phrases such as “Terrible news” and “Tragic” filled the comments section, as many members came together to discuss their personal experiences with the bookstore. Several community members who don’t live in the area anymore fondly remember their buying and selling experiences with the location, describing how “even though they don’t live around [there], the closure of the bookstore stings like they do.” This isn’t the first time that a local bookstore is closing. On Jan 21, 2025, Books Inc. closed its Berkeley bookstore after filing for bankruptcy. The San Francisco Chronicle acknowledges the long-standing identity of this bookstore as a “174-year-old-company” that also happens to be “the Bay Area’s oldest bookstore.” Adding onto this, Berkeleyside described the location as “lively and popular,” highlighting its almost magnetic ability to draw in visitors at all hours of the day.
As readers and community members come together to grieve the closure of these bookstores, it’s important to recognize that “reason” and “repercussion” must be separated from each other. No matter what the reason behind the closure of these bookstores is, the repercussions run much deeper than we realize. Now, when an incoming English major at UC Berkeley or any of the surrounding universities comes in to purchase their class readings, they will no longer be able to converse with a sparkly-eyed cashier. The barter of conversation and the transaction of suggestion will cease to exist, and the students will probably redirect themselves to the isolation of online purchases, because, for these bookstores, the love that they once received was not enough.
